Numbers in Fairy Tales, Myths, and Literature
Myths: The Foundation of Every Culture
Long before writing and books existed, people told each other stories. These weren’t mere entertainment. They preserved people’s worldview, carried it forward, and passed it down. They held everything necessary for understanding the world, and in doing so, shaped each culture in turn. And remarkably, striking parallels show up across cultures, even ones that developed independently of each other, separated by time and distance. Every culture, for instance, has its own hero stories. These laid out the central principles of what it means to be human, along with the challenges people face and the paths toward resolving them.
One example is the Epic of Gilgamesh (around 2100 BCE), which follows a semi-divine hero on a search for immortality, and along the way takes on themes like friendship, death, and the meaning of life. Similar structures show up in the Sanskrit epics of India, especially the Bhagavad Gita, which left a lasting mark on Hindu ethics, philosophy, and religious understanding. Later works followed, like Homer’s Iliad and the famous Odyssey. Myths like these were always central to cultural identity, and shaped it in fundamental ways (see also Schaefflertanz Munich).
Myths were often tied to constellations. By linking them to celestial bodies, people could pass stories down in vivid, visual form: humanity’s first “picture books.” For thousands of years, myths and constellations formed the foundation of cultural knowledge, and with it, the foundation of every world religion, right up through the invention of the printing press and beyond.
In the 20th century, myth researcher Joseph Campbell made a remarkable discovery: myths and hero stories from the most varied cultures follow a shared basic pattern, one he called the “hero’s journey,” or the “monomyth.” Even though the details differ, the structure is strikingly consistent, a sign that people everywhere, even in cultures that had no contact with each other at all, were describing a shared, objectively real experience in symbolic form. Much like the laws of physics hold true everywhere in the universe, as we know from modern science, people found universal principles long before that too. But these universal principles weren’t limited to bare facts. Above all, they carried wisdom that held true everywhere.
Later research confirmed Campbell’s findings. Star researcher Raoul Schrott discovered that every culture in the world has its own creation myths, and that these were closely tied to their respective constellations. What goes beyond this parallel and makes it truly remarkable: creation stories share the same plot worldwide, which is why Schrott speaks of a “prototypical creation story.”
Even though we don’t yet have a final explanation for this striking similarity, one thing is clear: an objective, timeless body of knowledge, a kind of natural philosophy, clearly existed, and people kept expressing it again and again through myths and stories.
What’s especially fascinating is that modern stories following the classic hero’s journey still move people deeply today, even when we don’t consciously recognize the structure behind them. Blockbusters like The Matrix, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Titanic owe much of their success to this exact archetypal narrative structure.
Number Symbolism in Myths and Fairy Tales
Another shared feature across many myths is number symbolism. That doesn’t just mean numbers show up often; numbers are universal, after all. It means the symbolic meaning of certain numbers, one that goes beyond their mere numerical value. That becomes especially clear when a number is used that obviously can’t be realistic. The Old Testament, for instance, says Adam fathered his first son at age 130 and then lived another 800 years, a sign that numbers serve a metaphorical function here. There are plenty of examples like this. (See also the article “Numbers in the Bible.”)
Number symbolism plays a central role in the Bible especially, the best-selling book in the world. Without understanding it, many passages stay closed off to us: Why does creation take seven days? Why are there twelve tribes of Israel? Why does Jesus fast for forty days? And why is 666 considered the number of the beast?
This affinity for number symbolism isn’t unique to the Bible. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero mourns Enkidu for seven days and seven nights. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus wanders for ten years on his journey home. In the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, we meet “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”
The central role of numbers goes well beyond myths. It’s just as central to most fairy tales.
What’s especially interesting is how much numbers still matter in fairy tales today: “The Seven Ravens,” “The Six Servants,” “The Devil’s Three Golden Hairs,” “How Six Men Got On in the World,” “One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes,” and plenty more.
On the surface, you might explain how often numbers show up as pure coincidence. But that doesn’t do justice to the central role these stories have played. Every one of them is a masterwork of its time, and most are still considered so today. Books like the Bible or fairy tale collections aren’t bought in such huge numbers for nothing. Every story, and the exact text it was written in, was carefully composed; almost nothing was left to chance. That’s why we can assume the numbers that show up so often, and the symbolism behind them, carried real, central meaning. We just often no longer know what that meaning was.
„Numbers seem to have captured the human imagination in a special way since the earliest of times, and even to have challenged it directly. There’s no other way to explain why every culture associates numbers with values that have little or nothing to do with the number’s actual quantity.“
(Harald Haarmann)
Numbers in Great Literature
The great works of world literature carry the tradition of number symbolism forward in impressive ways. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in particular, knew it deeply. It shows up in nearly all of his work. In Faust, for instance, number symbolism takes center stage. The prologue splits into three parts: Dedication, Prelude on the Stage, and Prologue in Heaven. Groups of three keep showing up within these sections too, in the cast of characters (the Director, the Dramatic Poet, the Merry Person), and among the heavenly beings (the Lord, Mephistopheles, and three archangels). Goethe presents the number three as a basic principle running through his entire narrative this way. We run into this same threefold structure elsewhere too, in the Bible, for instance: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” or “The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.” Dante’s Divine Comedy has a strict numerical structure too: three parts (Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso), thirty-three cantos each (plus one introductory canto, for a hundred total), terza rima form (three-line stanzas, rhyme scheme aba bcb cdc…), and so on. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, three witches open the play, famous for the line “When shall we three meet again?” These examples show the meaning of the number 3 acting as a kind of unifying structural element. Novalis was convinced “that a wondrous mysticism of numbers is at work in nature, and just as much in history.”
The best-known passage in Faust on the subject of number symbolism is probably the “Hexeneinmaleins,” the witch’s multiplication table.
„See, thus it’s done!
Make ten of one,
And two let be,
Make even three,
And rich thou’lt be.
Cast o’er the four!
From five and six
(The witch’s tricks)
Make seven and eight,
‘Tis finished straight!
And nine is one,
And ten is none.
This is the witch’s once-one’s-one! “
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part One (trans. Bayard Taylor)
Numbers in Modern Fairy Tales and Films
Stories aren’t a thing of the past. They’re just as relevant today as they’ve ever been. People love stories, and every year brings millions of new stories, tales, and hero’s journeys. Many modern films deliberately draw on the ancient tradition of numbers in fairy tales: The Lord of the Rings, Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Matrix, and on and on. What’s often not widely known is that many of them, especially the biggest hits and crowd-pleasers, follow Campbell’s classic hero’s journey. What jumps out more quickly is that number symbolism still plays a major role in most of them.
“Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die, One Ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them” (The Lord of the Rings); “seven years of school,” “seven books,” “the Deathly Hallows” (Harry Potter); The Little Mermaid is King Triton’s seventh daughter (tri = three); “Trinity” and seven agents (The Matrix); “Order 66” and Yoda’s age of 900 years (Star Wars); and plenty more.
Numbers in Fairy Tales: The Key to Understanding Stories
A look at humanity’s stories reveals several remarkable things. On one hand, they’re the original medium that every culture, world religion, and wisdom tradition is built on. Their central place in our lives hasn’t faded, even today. As Campbell showed, most myths and hero stories follow one unified basic pattern. That’s extraordinarily remarkable, since you’d expect stories written by individual people, each with subjective views and experiences, coming from wildly different times and places, to have only one thing in common: endless variety. That unified patterns actually lie behind all this variety is genuinely astonishing, and it raises the suspicion that we’re looking at basic patterns rooted in nature itself, patterns that can therefore be recognized objectively, again and again, everywhere. That might also explain why all these stories share something else in common: number symbolism. It runs through the most diverse stories like a universal language. Like no other symbolic language, it has served, and still serves, in a uniquely powerful way to explain how the world works and what fate awaits human beings within it. It’s been conveying what’s true and what matters for thousands of years. Sadly, though, our knowledge of what it actually says has been lost over the years, not least because of how far modern science has advanced on every front. A philosophy of numbers no longer exists. Today we still get just as excited about old and new stories as ever. We read classic literature, go to the theater and the movies, tell our children the famous fairy tales, but we no longer understand them. They still fascinate us just as much as they always have, but their deeper content stays closed off to us. What are the messages that run consistently through humanity’s stories, from beginning to end? Find out more in the book Verlorene Weisheit.
Image Credits: iStock.com/LagartoFilm (numbers on a green background)